On the day on which the weekly conference was held in Edinburgh, the same person slipped into the {175} pulpit a schedule, containing words to this effect: “Take up now the man whom you accounted another God, and consider the end to which his ambition hath brought him.” It was Knox’s turn to preach that day. On entering the pulpit he took up the paper, supposing it to be a note requesting the prayers of the congregation for a sick person, and having read it, laid it aside without any apparent emotion. But towards the conclusion of his sermon, after deploring the loss which the church and commonwealth had recently sustained, and declaring the account of the conference, which had been circulated, to be false and calumnious, he said that there were persons who rejoiced at the treasonable murder, and scrupled not to make it the subject of their merriment; and particularly, there was one present who had thrown into the pulpit a paper exulting over an event which was the cause of grief to all good men: “that wicked man, whosoever he be, shall not go unpunished, and shall die where there shall be none to lament him.” Maitland, after he went home, said to his sister, that the preacher was raving, when he spake in such a manner of a person who was unknown to him; but she, suspecting that her brother had written the line, reproved him, saying with tears, that none of that man’s denunciations were wont to prove idle. Spotswood (who had his information personally from the mouth of that lady) says, that Maitland died in Italy, “having no known person to attend him.”[216] {176} On Tuesday the 14th of February, the regent’s corpse was brought from the palace of Holyroodhouse, and interred in the south aisle of the collegiate church of St Giles. Before the funeral, Knox preached a sermon on these words, “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord.” Three thousand persons were dissolved in tears before him, while he described the virtues of the regent, and bewailed his loss.[217] Buchanan paid a tribute to the memory of his deceased patron, by writing the inscription placed on his monument, with that expressive simplicity and brevity which are dictated by genuine grief.[218] A convention of the nobility was held after the funeral, at which it was resolved to avenge his death; but different opinions were entertained as to the mode of doing this, and the commons complained loudly of the remissness with which the resolution was prosecuted. The General Assembly, at their first meeting, testified {177} their detestation of the crime, by ordering the assassin to be publicly excommunicated in all the chief towns of the kingdom, and by appointing the same process to be used against all who should afterwards be convicted of accession to the murder.[219]